Trump trip financing in question

A lawyer for Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, told reporters in Iowa today that his trip -- on the Trump corporate jet -- had been financed by a business supporter and booster of Trump's, Stewart Rahr.

The trip poses a serious campaign finance issue for Trump, experts say: If the trip was -- as Cohen explicitly suggested -- aimed at testing the waters for a presidential bid, it falls under a strict set of fundraising requirements that appear already to have been violated.

Specifically, Campaign Legal Center's Paul Ryan told POLITICO, "testing the waters" efforts are subject to a ban on corporate and union donations and a contribution limit of $2,500.

"Federal law is really clear here: if you are speidng money determining whether to run that falls under the caterogy of 'testing the waters' and you have to use federally permissible funds," Ryan said, a point he argued in a recent white paper.

Ryan and other campaign finance watchers have long railed against the way in which "testing the waters" is stretched to include everything from Newt Gingrich's travels to Iowa on the tab of his organization, American Solutions, to Haley Barbour's purchase of an Iowa voters contact list with money from his Georgia-registered PAC.

But in a novel legal twist, Cohen conceded in an interview that he was "testing the waters" -- and just denied that he was doing it on his boss's behalf.

"I'm not testing the waters for his campaign. I'm testing the waters to see and to gauge the interest that iowa would have seeing someone like Donald Trump run," he said.

Cohen said that while he identifies himself as an "executive vice president at the Trump Organization and special counsel" to Trump, and while he used a Trump.org email to correspond with this reporter, he had taken a "personal day" to conduct his independent effort.

"Aside from being an executive at the Trump Organization, i'm also an American citizen, i'm also a father, i'm also a taxpayer," he said.

If Trump wanted to test the waters legally, Ryan said, he could pay for testing-the-waters trips out of his pocket -- though not with funds from his real estate company or any other corporate entity.